Bit-error resilient packetization for streaming h.264/avc video

Bit errors in the radio channel can severely decrease the efficiency of the link utilization in wireless multimedia communications. One possibility to avoid consuming bandwidth with numerous packet retransmissions and thus improve the performance of a wireless video streaming system is to pass the packets to the application layer, even if they are corrupted by bit errors. In this case, the application layer should be capable of using partially damaged video data. Unfortunately, the state-of-the-art video coding standards do not fully support bit error resiliency. In this paper, we propose bit error resilient packetization strategies for streaming H.264/AVC video, based on the use of small slices and protection of the most vulnerable bits only using the UDP-Lite protocol. The simulation results show that the resilience against bit errors can be increased with only slightly decreased compression efficiency, which results in improved streaming performance.